rade

Forms

rade (third-person singular present rade, past participle ras, third-person subjunctive radă), 3rd conjugation.^[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin rādō (“to scrape, shave”).^{[2][3][4][5][6][1]} The Latin verb goes back to Proto-Italic *razdō, with Celtic cognates such as Welsh rhathu (“to scrape”); since the family is found only in Italic and Celtic, a PIE origin is uncertain.^[7]

It survives south of the Danube as Aromanian arad.^[2][8][9] The Romance cognates include Italian radere, Old French rere, Occitan raire, Catalan raure and Spanish raer.^[2][6] radia “to strike off a list”, from French radier, is a doublet.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

Tiktin dates the first record to the Palia de la Orăștie of 1581–1582, in Genesis 41:14, where Joseph is shaved before he is brought to Pharaoh.^[10] MDA2's first record is Moxa's chronicle of 1620, in the sense “to scrape off”: „rade obrazele de pre ziduri” “scrape the faces off the walls”.^[3][10][5]

Semantic evolution

The Latin sense “to scrape” lives on in “to scrape off”, “to erase writing” and “to grate”, and shaving became the commonest sense.^[5][4] Tiktin quotes Neculce on the emperor who „i-au ras barba cu mâna lui” “shaved his beard with his own hand”.^[10] The sense “to raze a fortress to the ground” Șăineanu took for a Gallicism after French raser.^[11] Old texts also used it for a torture in which the flesh was scraped.^[3][5]

Familiar Romanian has many idioms: a o rade or a rade putina “to run off”, a rade pe cineva fără săpun “to dress someone down”, să-mi razi mustața “you can shave off my moustache (if I'm wrong)”, a rade o palmă “to land a slap”.^[4][3] Ciorănescu sees in a o rade a normal shift of meaning, like a o tunde and a o șterge, not a borrowing from Romani.^[2] The past participle ras “shaved” gave neras “unshaven”;^[2] răsură may come straight from rāsūra.^[2]

Timeline

• 1581–1582 – in the Palia de la Orăștie, the first record.^[10]
• 1620 – rade “scrape off” in Moxa's chronicle.^[3][5]
• 1649 – razi “you shave” in Mardarie's Slavonic–Romanian lexicon.^[12]
• 1688 – raseră “they shaved” in the Bucharest Bible.^[13]

Meanings

Verb

1. (transitive and reflexive) To shave the hair, beard or moustache to the root, with a razor or a shaver.^[4][1]
2. (transitive) To remove the hair from an animal's skin or the scales from a fish.^[4]
3. (transitive) To scrape off a thin layer from the surface of something.^[4][3]
4. (transitive) To erase writing with a rubber or a blade.^[4]
5. (transitive) To grate.^[4]
6. (transitive, figurative) To destroy, wipe off the face of the earth.^[4][1]

Word family

• răsătură
• neras
• răsură
• ras
• răzătură

Related words

• raz
• răzui
• radia
• Aromanian arad
• Latin rādō

Usage notes

Ciorănescu has a separate slang interjection rade “out!, get lost!”, from the Romani imperative of rad-, helped by the phrase a o rade.^[2] Rade is not to be confused with râde “to laugh”.^[4]

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h Ciorănescu, Alexandru (1958–1966), Diccionario etimológico rumano, La Laguna: Universidad de La Laguna (Romanian ed.: Dicționarul etimologic al limbii române, București: Saeculum, 2001), p. s.v. rade
3. ^ a b c d e f Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 2, 616
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 906
5. ^ a b c d e Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. rade
6. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 6987
7. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
8. ^ Papahagi, Tache (1963), Dicționarul dialectului aromân, general și etimologic, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 125
9. ^ Pascu, Giorge (1925), Dictionnaire étymologique macédoroumain, 2 vols. (I: Les éléments latins et romans; II: Les éléments grecs, turcs, slaves, albanais, germaniques, magyars, néologismes, créations immédiates, obscurs), Iași: Cultura Națională, p. 1, 36
10. ^ a b c d Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. ráde
11. ^ Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 1, 529
12. ^ Ungureanu, Mădălina; Gînsac, Ana-Maria; Moruz, Alexandru (eds.), eRomLex: The First Romanian Bilingual Dictionaries (17th century), Iași: Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, https://scriptadacoromanica.ro, p. s.v. razi
13. ^ Biblia, adecă Dumnezeiasca Scriptură a ceii vechi și a ceii noao leage, București, 1688 (ed. 1988, tricentennial edition), p. Facerea 41:14